“Mountains High: What in
the World Are We Waiting For?”
Happy New Year! Earth Church Year! A new
year! A new dance! With all of God’s Creation! “Old and “New!” Earth and
Church! As per our Words for Mediation: “Be silent / and contemplate the
Dance. / Just look. / A star, / a flower, / a fading leaf, / A bird, / a
stone / any fragment will do.” God knows, we are surrounded by snows and
the signs of God’s newest Earth season this morning! A new dance as well
with God’s Church, with God’s “New Creation,” we say – “Dance, my heart, at
your rebirth, / partner to the dance of earth!”
“I danced in the morning when the world was
begun, / and I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun, / and I came
down from heaven and I danced on the earth. / At Bethlehem I had my birth.
“Dance, then, wherever you may be; / I am the Lord of the Dance, said he. /
And I’ll lead you all wherever you may be, / and I’ll lead you all in the
dance, said he.”
Julie and I were thankful to dance a safe
way home through the mountains late last night. We are thankful for
Thanksgiving with family! My mother, visiting my sister, is hospitalized
with asthmatic bronchitis in Huntsville, TX. I appreciate your prayers for
her. Thanks to Rev. John Emerson and Rev. Dixie Jennings-Teats for filling
our pulpit.
Two Sundays ago we attended a conference in
Las Vegas on “the gift economy,” as distinct from “the market economy.”
That way very different way of looking at life and at economics makes at
least two basic assumptions:
- The cosmos and earth began preparing
gifts of life for our species billions of years before we showed up at
last, and at great cost to them, and they still prepare fresh gifts for
us each day!
- Mothering
and the free gifts of care and nurture, as preserved and practiced in many
native cultures (such as, by the Tongans with whom we are “gifted” to share
life and work here!), are much more deeply, richly human than such
artificial market costs as consumption and competition, conflict and often
conquest.
Are not church and religious community,
living by free gifts and graces of the source we call “God,” practicing
communion, free distribution of God’s life and God’s love, at our center,
called, by nature, to be “gift economies?” Living, literally, by
thanksgiving?
Last Sunday I preached at First UMC Carson
City as “outside leader” of their Consecration Sunday worship and dinner,
celebrating the call to giving in the life and work of the congregation.
They seem to have done very well. I hope to present the campaign as an
option for us in the spring. I thank our Church Conference for creating a
year-round Stewardship Committee that will see support of giving and “gift
economy” as their gift to us as a congregation! Giving is not an option to
discipleship. It is not a way of meeting church budgets. It is the most
basic expression of who, and of whose, we are – made in the image of God the
Give of Life! Then last Saturday I also had the great privilege and
pleasure, because of how we “give” use of this wonderful building, first
“given” to us, to speak to the annual “gratitude dinner” of Reno/Sparks AA
at Circus Circus.
So it has been a real “Thanksgiving” ride for us. The gifts of God keep
coming. The seasons of God keep rolling around. We come to this
Advent season and Winter cycle at the start of the Earth Church Year so high
on “purple mountain majesties,” we do not need any other substance to take
us higher. Our youth group saw themselves as following Jesus up mountains
to pray on their way to Yellowstone last summer.
Faith traditions everywhere see mountains
all over the world as connecting heaven and earth, divine and human,
promised and real, eternal and now. Our worship planning team invites us
this season to see our spiritual travel together as quest, as climb, as
approach and address to infinities of time and space. Mountains illuminate
and reveal to us “the big picture” of life and our precious tiny place in
it, precious and tiny as the birth of a savior in a stable. Mountains make
it possible for us to return to the plains and valleys filled with new views
and vistas, new vision and new voice.
Our gospel this year is Matthew, and
mountains are very “Mattean,” points out Terry Donaldson in the book
Jesus on the Mountain: A Study in Mattean Theology. Near the
beginning of the gospel, Jesus is prepared for ministry, for the right use
of his authority, by temptation on a high mountain. At the end of the
gospel, having spent his authority on the cross, Jesus shares universal
authority with the church on a mountain in Galilee.
In between, Jesus speaks his “Sermon on the
Mount” (which Luke the Leveler puts on “the Plain” instead); feeds crowds
who come to the mountain for healing; is transfigured on the mountaintop in
the presence of disciples, plus Moses and Elijah (well- known for their own
mountaintop experiences with God); and speaks of “the end-times” from the
Mountain of Olives in Jerusalem. Jesus’ (and our) very Jewish tradition is
founded on the revelation of God on Mt. Sinai and by the promise of Mt. Zion
in Jerusalem where all nations and peoples, at last, will gather to heal and
be healed, to fill and be filled, with feasting forever!
We embrace all the Earth gifts of God, --
mountains and plains, valleys and hills, oceans and rivers, stars and skies,
-- as giving and nurturing to all the Church gifts of God, -- life and love,
health and hope, justice and joy, plenty and peace. Advent says, “Come!”
We are called to Advent-ture, to live, to wait, to watch at the edge of
expectation that God is always about to do a “new thing” in our midst.
As we wait and we watch, awake and aware, alive and alert to the slightest,
most subtle of sights, sounds, and signs, we also imagine and dream what the
new and renewing gifts of God bring to life and to love for all the
long-suffering world.
In Isaiah’s images, what mountain of a household, an economy, will God
establish as highest of mountains, beacon of light to all nations and
peoples, where we might be taught in the ways and led in the paths of
justice and peace? What judgment and what mercy will God show the nations,
what arbitration of conflict and conquest, of violence and revenge, that we
might give up our weapons of every kind, turn them to useful and fruitful
work, and never learn war any more? For war is not our natural state
but our all-too-human perversion. War is an all-too-well learned
artifice and acquired taste. What we heave learned, we must believe,
we surely can unlearn as well!
Imagine a world where war is unlearned,
unpracticed, un- “needed” any more. A congregation in Canada last year
broke ground for a “sanctuary garden” with a trowel made up of metal from a
confiscated gun and piece of an old church pew. The pastor refers to the
theology of this text from Isaiah as “deceptively simple: there is nothing –
no gun, bomb, tank, factory, vacant lot – that can’t be turned into
something else; a shovel, a swing-set, a house, a garden. There is no
fragment, no molecule in all of Creation that is not a vessel of God and so
a means of life! Isn’t this the core teaching of Jesus?” he asks. “Where
others saw useless and broken people, he saw humanity, possibility, and
beauty, shalom unfolding.” Is that not shorthand for the Earth Church
Year? Shalom unfolding?
This pastor is no otherworldly illusionist. He knows, as he says, “The
Sanctuary Garden is filling in nicely. And the shovel will reside in
some corner of the church, and will pass into collective memory as ‘that gun
project.’” [I remember doing a few of those in my time. They laughed
me out of town in rural northern Michigan, where you wore red and whistled
the whole time you were out of your car at the dump during deer season, when
I circulated petitions for gun control after the deaths of Dr. King and
Bobby Kennedy. They tore down the Children’s Sabbath sign against gun
violence to children and young people from high on the wall of our church in
Fresno.]
“And all this amounts to noting more,” the
pastor continues, “than an interesting diversion, unless, for a moment, we
dream. We have seen, this past year, the largest and best resourced armies
humanity has ever deployed.” [That’s right! That’s us! We win! We hold
all the records. Nobody can possible match our achievements. The earth
cannot sustain another us. But what if we wanted to be known more as “good”
than as “great?” . . .] “We have unfolded plans for new towers and museums.
We have a sense of the scope in which we can do things. Can we think, now,
about a massive re-imagining of our capacities? . . . The Holy One is not
finished with the act of creation . . . the redeeming of not just our steel,
but our hearts, is ongoing.” Earth Church Year: ongoing redeeming of
hearts?
In Jesus’ words here, how do we learn to
practice, and to support each other in practicing, the child-like urgency
and dependency of receiving each day, -- each hour, each moment, -- as well
as each people, each person, each relationship, -- as precious gift?
Unrepeatable and irreplaceable? In the midst of such mystery? Such that
remains unknown, and unknowable? So much that remains uncertain, and
unpredictable? Even like thieves, like “thefting,” in the night?
How do we learn to live so lightly, so limberly, so gracefully and so
gratefully with life, that it may be stolen from us, we may be robbed of it
any time? For we never know in what part of the night the thief may be
coming. We never know how God’s “new thing” literally may “break into”
our shut and sealed lives, transcending the locks, the gates, the alarms,
and the weapons. Getting through all our pretenses and all our
defenses, to reach the real and the ready “us,” --even in spite of
ourselves! I once had surgery in a hospital where it was printed on
every gown, every sheet, every towel: “PROPERTY OF NORTHWESTERN
HOSPITAL. NEVER SOLD. UNAUTHORIZED POSSESSION OF THIS ARTICLE
CONSTITUTES THEFT BY CONVERSION!”
Theft by conversion. That just may be the
work of Jesus in our lives this season! We are not “for sale.” At
Christmas, or any other time of the year. We cannot be “bought.” Our value
lies far beyond measure by the markets of this world. We are purely God’s
gifts to this world. Without any authorization whatsoever, purely by grace,
God possesses us! God “thefts” us from the world, steals us by our
conversion. God makes us God’s own, God redeems us by grace, forever!
We are stolen by God from the illusions of
this world’s grandeur -- from the madness of the market, competition and
cost, conflict and conquest, locks and gates, weapons and wars – even long
before we come to see the folly of its ways for ourselves. Just think of
how much is invested in advertising! In shaping us to see ourselves more as
consumers and spectators of life – leaving the big decisions to those in
control and “in charge” of our lives -- than as the producers and
participants of life God means us to be – trusting ourselves, our own
experience and own wisdom, to meet challenges and to make changes in life.
According to Advent, the surest sign of
God’s spirit is that we are surprised at God’s coming and God’s converting
of our everyday lives! We are not awake, we are not alert, we are not
watching or waiting. None of that keeps God from coming. God steals us,
possesses us, converts us as God will – according to God’s own time and
mysterious manner of doing in Christ. God steals us, not so much out of the
world, as into the world again in new ways! In ways through Church, and
Earth Church Year, -- ways through the gifted body of sharing believers –
ways of justice, ways of peace. God starts stealing us while we are “yet
slaves in Egypt.” God is not done stealing us yet!
